The coffee comes from my cup, the smoke comes from a man in jean jacket and spendy fashion version of combat boots one picnic table over from mine. We’re all at picnic tables in the backyard-turned-patio of the house-turned-coffee-shop in the Puerto-Rican-turned-hip enclave of Humboldt Park.

I hauled some boxes from storage this week and made the mistake of looking at my past.

Letters, birthday cards, photos of people I had forgotten about and of people I won’t ever be able to. Trinkets and trophies hard-won but now more a matter of storage space than personal pride.

I’ve googled some people from that shared past, disparate present. Of course their photos are lovely and their web presence curated. Of course no one posts the moments of whimsy and maudlin and floating, aimless sad. No one of this crowd but me was dumb enough to put anything but happy things online.

Voting is like improv comedy: The fact you’re unprepared is only amusing to you.

For the rest of us, those who take more than one stab at existence and who tire of any activity with a cover and two-drink minimum to watch state school theater majors laugh harder at their own jokes than the audience ever will, we like to be a little more prepared.

Pseudo-speakeasies, modern burlesque and of course craft cocktails are the thing across Chicago’s nightlife.

We want to imagine ourselves hobnobbing with the Dil Picklers, dancing to Louis Armstrong all night at the Sunset Café. (We don’t picture ourselves getting shaken down for protection money or forced to use the colored person entrance to buildings, but Prohibition is far from the only era to get a romantic whitewashing.)

Being a person who knows actual history, I’m aware that most cocktails weren’t a sign of class and style so much as sugary attempts to stretch out what little booze they could get. And Ben Hecht fabricated many if not most of his 1001 Afternoons in Chicago stories, so feet of clay all around here, folks.

To slap your joy with the open palm of reality, I gathered several friends and forced them to try and rate two nasty, noxious and just-as-authentic-as-a-Sazerac Prohibition-era craft cocktails. » Read the rest of this entry «

He told his piece to the crowd thick like lichen on every free surface of the tiny tavern. He gave stats on Latinos with PhDs. He talked about dodging gunfire the night before he defended his dissertation.

He backtracked and repeated himself. He laughed at his own jokes and sometimes talked so close to the mic I couldn’t understand him. He was unpolished and unprofessional.